Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Boy Scouts of America another Christian Holier than thou Bible Thumpers who have been exposed for their cover-up of sexual assault crimes against children. Those who cover up such crimes are as guilty as those who commit them.

In this April 13, 2010 file photo, Kerry Lewis, left, leans into his lawyer, Paul Mones, in a Portland, Ore., courtroom after a jury found the Boy Scouts of America negligent for repeated sexual abuse by an assistant Scoutmaster in the 1980s. Local Boy Scout leaders and town officials helped hush up numerous child sex abuse allegations against scoutmasters and other volunteers, according to details in a trove of nearly 15,000 pages of so-called "perversion files" compiled by the Scouts from 1959

Hasidic Jews Modesty Police in Brooklyn New York

And now for something a little lighter -Fun with Glenn Beck and his new theme park for patriots and Christians only .

ultra-orthodox Jews patrolling streets in Brooklyn New York enforcing their own modesty code ignored by the anti-Muslim Islamophobes such as Fox News, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes and the queen of the Islamophobes Pam Geller who is responsible for Hate Speech ads in NY targeting all Muslims.

If this were a Muslim group all of these characters or if you prefer bigots would be up in arms and demand that these activities be stopped and they would call on their bigoted troops across the USA to hold protest against creeping Sharia but when non-Muslims do these things it's no big deal.

But it would be headline news across America if these were ultraconservative Muslims doing the same thing enforcing Sharia rules about modesty . The mainstream media especially Fox News, CNN and the usual Islamophobic suspects would be in hysterics claiming America was being taken over by Muslims. But when Jews or Christians take similar actions there is not such a great outcry about trampling on the US constitution.

In ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities across New York state, women wear long skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the street; men wear suits and white collar shirts, buttoned to the neck; and girls are told the precise color and thickness of the stockings they can wear to school.

And these aren’t just recommendations – community modesty codes are strictly enforced. Not just by social custom, but by a self-appointed, shadowy group of men who police a predominantly Hasidic neighborhood in North Brooklyn, according to a report in the New York Times.

“They operate like the Mafia,” Rabbi Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University, told the Times. “They walk into a store and say it would be a shame if your window was broken or you lost your clientele,” he said. “They might tell the father of a girl who wears a skirt that’s too short and he’s, say, a store owner: ‘If you ever want to sell a pair of shoes, speak to your daughter.’”

Many of the rules of conduct are focused explicitly on regulating what Hasidic women car wear in public, believing that an uncovered head or a skirt that reveals too much will arouse the sexual attention of men and boys.

But in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the issue of non-compliance with ultra-Orthodox modesty rules has crept into neighboring secular areas. In 2009, Hasidic South Williamsburg community members successfully rallied to block a bike lane that brought outside bicyclists — specifically, women wearing shorts — through the neighborhood.

...“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider themselves Gut’s polizei,” Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist, using the words for “God’s police,” told the Times.

“It’s somebody who is a busybody, and there are quite a few of them — zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”

Boy Scouts of America sex scandal continues as judge orders more documents be released to the court and the public.

— A Minnesota judge on Tuesday ordered the handover of confidential national Boy Scout records on sexual abuse from 1999 to 2008 in a move attorneys said could add to the body of evidence showing that the organization failed to take adequate steps to protect young people from molesters in its ranks.

Ramsey County District Judge Elena Ostby issued the order in a lawsuit involving former suburban Minneapolis scoutmaster Peter Stibal II, who is serving a 21-year prison sentence for molesting four scouts in his troop. The lawsuit was filed by one of his victims.

That victim's attorney, Jeff Anderson, said these files are from internal Boy Scouts of America records on adult volunteers suspected of molestation that are widely known as the "perversion files," but they cover a later period than records made public last October by court order in Oregon, which covered from 1965 to 1985. He called the order a triumph over institutional secrecy.

The hypocrisy on the part of churches is astounding. These churches are angry that the Boy Scouts of America might change its rule against allowing Gays into their organization. The churches say the organization is turning its back on Biblical principles. And yet most of these churches have been silent over the news that since about 1959 the Boy Scouts of America has done all that it could to cover up the sexual abuses against children committed by Scout Leaders. Instead of reporting them to the police like the Catholic Church they did little or nothing .

So inorder to attempt to build new bridges that is to save the organization from extinction given all the bad press on its sexual scandals the Boy Scouts of America has decided it has been historically a bit hypocritical to cover up the actions of pedophiles who were Scout Leaders while refusing to allow Gays or Atheists to belong to their organization. Part of what they are admitting is that their excuses for keeping gays out is not reality based since these pedophiles in their organization were all considered to be mentally healthy upstanding heterosexual males and yet some turned out to be pedophiles. The erroneous prejudice and assumption has been that Gays are not moral and are not real Christians and that they would be more likely to sexually assault children than would heterosexual male Christian adults. The Boy Scouts has had a ban on Gay teenagers or having Gay scout leaders from joining .
So being a Christian and a heterosexual does not preclude someone from being also a pedophile.

The Boy Scouts of America announced earlier this week that they are considering an end to their decades-long ban on gay members, leaving it to regional and local councils to dictate membership guidelines on sexuality.

The news was met with cheers from scouts across the country who have been banned from the organization after coming out, but many conservative and religious leaders are angry about what they see as the organization abandoning its long-standing commitment to biblical principles.

“If that is what the leadership is doing, then I think it will be a sad day in the life of the Boy Scouts of America,” Fred Luter, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told the Baptist Press. “This is a tradition that so many of us across the country grew up in. We were in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts in elementary school, and this organization has always stood for biblical principles — all the things that grounded our lives as a young kid growing up. To now see this organization that I thought stood on biblical principles about to give in to the politically correct thing is very disappointing.”

About 70 percent of all Boy Scout troops are sponsored by faith-based organizations, with the Southern Baptists, Catholic Church, Lutheran Church, United Methodist Church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints representing the most troops, according to Fox News.

And many are suggesting they will break financial and membership ties with the organization if the policy goes through.

“Churches of all faiths and denominations, including Southern Baptist churches, will be forced to reevaluate whether they can, in good conscience, continue to host Scout troops given that the Scouts appear poised to turn their backs on this clear biblical and moral issue,” Roger Oldham, spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, said.

A bridge too far according to the Boy Scouts of America would be allowing atheists to join the Boy Scouts of America. So accepting Gays might be okay but not atheists. And yet it seems the Girl Scouts constitution does not allow for members of the organization to discriminate against anyone solely based upon their religious beliefs.

For former scoutmaster Richard Guglielmetti, the Boy Scouts of America's reconsideration of its ban on gay scouts and leaders is long overdue.

Guglielmetti, 66, who led Troop 76 in Simsbury, Conn., for a dozen years until 2005, said leaders and members of his troop ignored the national organization's prohibition on gays because they felt it was wrong.

"It's about time," he said Monday (Jan. 28).

Despite the national policies set forth by BSA, his troop always rejected the policy, Guglielmetti said.

"We had a bunch of boys in our troop who were gay, and they all felt the policy was wrong," he said. "Gay Scouts and everybody was always welcome in our troop."

One of those Scouts was Guglielmetti's own son, Matthew, now 34. Last year, Matthew turned in the Eagle Scout award he earned in 1993 because of Scouting's anti-gay policies, his father said.